A Home Office spokesman last night denied that the trial was a pilot for identity cards, but acknowledged that “its results will feed into the debate” on the project. The pilot scheme was “a testing process for facial recognition for one-to-one verification using iris and fingerprint biometrics”, he said. That would involve an immigration or police officer using a scanner to check the identity of a cardholder.

(Source: The Guardian)

So despite opposition to the idea, Blunkett wants to press on regardless. It’s also worth remembering that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support claims that the ID card will help prevent terrorism, or benefit fraud, or even help us to curb the rising tide of swarthy foreigners that so threaten to overwhelm our green and pleasant land, which seem to be the three big issues that come up in association with the scheme.

Liberty has highlighted the fact that other Western European countries with ID cards do not seem to have solved any of these complex social and economic problems. Identity cards may be a handy PR gimmick for the Government to try and show it is “doing something”, but it has not been shown to be a useful policy tool on the continent. Indeed, much of the evidence seems to point to national identity card schemes worsening community and race relations, fuelling a criminal industry in the production of forgeries, and causing administrative problems for the authorities.

(Source: Liberty)

Brought to you via An Oasis, which was spotted updating in the wild with the help of the UK Blogs Aggregator.

I have always felt apprehensive about the proposals to introduce ID cards that crop up on the UK’s political landscape from time to time. My reasons for this include:

• We seem to have done pretty well without them up until now.
• I can think of lots of far more worthy things upon which to spend upwards of 1.5 billion quid of taxpayers money.
• I just don’t like the idea. I don’t want to live in a total surveillance society where my every move through life is catalogued in a file somewhere. We’re already moving in this direction faster than is comfortable anyway.
• I can’t help but feel a little cynical about the whole scheme. It feels to me more like an effort to get this central repository of personal info set up for the benefit of the government rather than the people.
• I think that there are serious concerns over the security of this information and the potential for it to be abused.

To partially illustrate this last point, I’m going to reproduce part of the answer to the question “You Say It Won’t Leak My Information ? But How Can You Stop It?” from the Stand‘s website:

Well, the record sure ain’t good thus far. There is no shortage of stories about police officers abusing criminal records databases.

But for our money, the Home Office’s very own report (PDF) on Police Integrity makes for the most interesting reading:

THE INTEGRITY OF INFORMATION

6.6 Most police intelligence is now stored on computers and, with many members of staff being able to access it through their own terminal, it is a daunting task to try and protect it. To illustrate the potential problem, the Inspection Team is aware a spot audit in one force revealed that within 24 hours of the arrest of a high profile criminal for alleged murder, 67 officers accessed his intelligence record. When interviewed, most acknowledged they did it purely out of curiosity but it would have been equally possible for an unscrupulous member of staff to leak the information unlawfully to other criminals or the press.

The Stand are a loose organisation of volunteers originally set up to oppose the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but who have since diversified a bit. You can find out more about them at their about page.

They also provide an automated response form to send off your views to the Entitlement Cards Unit as part of the currently ongoing consultation process. Of course, you might feel that before you took the word of a bunch of net.liberals you should find out what the government has to say on the issue.

The Home Office Entitlement Cards Unit has a website where they cover the consultation process. The actual paper is available for download from this page, but it’s 12.7 megabytes in size. You can download it in smaller chunks too, but there’s 12 of them. They also provide a FAQ (html), and a summary (PDF, 310kb) of the process, but if you’re not going to believe the summaries produced by the anti camp, why believe the government’s? This is an awful lot of material to download over a slow bandwidth connection and to digest. And there’s only a couple of weeks or so left until the consultation process closes, on the 31st January. Of course if you really want to see what the government is saying on this, you’ll just have to download it.

The Stand isn’t the only place that has more condensed information about the scheme. They point to a FAQ at the Privacy International website, which covers many of the issues brought up by the scheme.

One reason I thought it important to post this is that it appears that the government are claiming that there is widespread support for the scheme, despite nobody that I have asked in the last couple of days even being aware that there was a consultation process going on. Whatever your views on this, I hope that you’d agree that it’s too important to allow to slip under the radar, and that it needs to be discussed properly before the government’s spin machine cranks up a gear or two. See what the Stand have to say on their homepage about this support.

I make no pretense that any of the sites referenced above, other than the Home Office, are anything but negative towards the scheme. If you know of any places, independent of vested interests, where I can find positive discussion of the scheme, please let me know and I’ll post the links as updates, as I think that it’s important that people should make up their own minds.